At INFODAD, we rank everything we review with plus signs, on a scale from one (+) [disappointing] to four (++++) [definitely worth considering]. We mostly review (+++) or better items. Very rarely, we give an exceptional item a fifth plus. We are independent reviewers and, as parents, want to help families learn which books, music, and computer-related items we and our children love...or hate. INFODAD is a service of TransCentury Communications, Inc., Fort Myers, Florida, infodad@gmail.com.

Autumn means pumpkins,
and Halloween, and lots of books about pumpkins and Halloween, and lots of fun
for kids of all ages (and grown-ups like to play dress-up, too!).The youngest children, ages 1-4, have a treat
in store in a new board book from the If
You Give a Mouse a Cookie team of Laura Numeroff and Felicia Bond: It’s Pumpkin Day, Mouse! Using new text
by Numeroff and illustrations by Bond that are a mixture of the new and the old
(some date back as far as 1985), the book simply and delightfully shows Mouse
happily decorating seven pumpkins…or six, actually, since Dog takes one and
does some decorating of his own.There
is no age-inappropriate carving here – the decorations are made with paint, and
things get only a little bit messy (luckily, the two friends are working
outdoors and on newspaper – and when the paper doesn’t catch all the splatter,
the grass does).The different pumpkins,
from silly to friendly to very slightly scary, are adorable, as are Mouse and
Dog themselves, and the book is just plain fun.

There is fun as well
in Mia: Time to Trick or Treat! This
(+++) book is for slightly older children, ages 3-5, and aimed mostly at girls
with its story of three ballerina friends (kitten, hippo, giraffe) who want to
wear matching Halloween ballet costumes but cannot agree on what color to make
them.Of course, they compromise,
tie-dyeing the leotards and tutus so all the colors they like are
included.And then they do bits of ballet
for the people who open their doors to them during trick-or-treat. The book
includes a page of stickers so Mia’s fans can dress her and her ballerina
friends up and decorate the book with appropriately Halloween-focused pumpkins,
smiling bats and the like.The story is
a little thin, but will be fun for girls who enjoy ballet and already know Mia
and like her.

Just Say Boo! and Bedtime for
Boo are both about sounds and how to handle them, and although only Just Say Boo! is tied directly to
Halloween, both of these (++++) books fit the season quite well.Just
Say Boo! offers a series of questions to which the book’s title provides
the answer: “If a yip and a yowl/ make you shiver and scowl,/ what do you say?”
And: “If the wind whirls and whines/ as it whips through the pines,/ what
dooooo yooooou saaaaaay?”As the
spellings make clear, Susan Hood plays some games with expectations here, and
in fact “boo” becomes “Eww!” at one point and “Trick or Treat” and “Thank you”
elsewhere.Jed Henry’s pleasant,
autumn-toned illustrations of a happy night out in costumes help the story move
along smartly, and also help Hood throw in a lesson or two: let a scary spider
go instead of harming it, and reassure a toddler who gets frightened by all the
noise.There is plenty of warmth here
for a chilly Halloween evening.As for Bedtime for Boo, here Boo is a little
ghost, not an exclamation, and here the many sounds mentioned by Mickie Matheis
are ones that help Boo go to sleep after a long night of haunting.Boo’s Mama tells the sleepy but
unable-to-sleep little ghost to relax and listen to the sounds of the house
(although her comment, “Let’s use our ears,” is unintentionally funny, since
Bonnie Leick’s cute pictures show the ghosts without any ears).Differing type styles and Leick’s
illustrations help make the book visually attractive for ages 2-6, as Boo hears
bats flapping, flapping; spiders clicking, clicking; skeletons rattling,
rattling; wolves howling, howling; and other sounds, too, “as ghosts float by
with a whoosh.”The ghosts-floating refrain helps make the
book a pleasant Halloween-ish bedtime story for little trick-or-treaters, even
though the holiday itself is never mentioned.And of course Boo drifts off to sleep with a happy smile as the sounds
of the house make him feel relaxed and comfortable.

Speaking of comfort:
the little girl who narrates I Like Old
Clothes finds hand-me-downs very comfortable indeed.And it is easy to imagine her dressing up for
Halloween – or other play time – in “clothes with a history, clothes with a
mystery,” even though nowadays so many children wear pre-made Halloween costumes
rather than ones based on discards.No
matter: this little girl and her baby brother celebrate the anytime delights of
“clothes that belonged to a friend of a friend,” “once-for-good clothes,/
now-for-play clothes.”Parents will
quickly pick up on the nostalgia underlying Mary Ann Hoberman’s poem – which
was originally published in 1976, with illustrations by Jacqueline Chwast – but
kids ages 5-8 will more likely just hear and see the fun in the book, as the
girl and boy try on matching or non-matching outfits, make puppets from old
socks, and get the cat involved in dress-up.Today’s kids will enjoy following along (with the help of the new, warm
illustrations by Patrice Barton) as the girl tells and shows all the ways in
which “I like old clothes,/ Faded-out clothes,/ Not-so-new clothes,/
Where-were-you clothes.”In a society
where just about everything is disposable, Hoberman’s sentiments seem rather
quaint, but in a good way – and the (++++) book’s entire presentation is so
enjoyable that it could even become the basis for a very modern discussion of
the fun, rather than the duty or political correctness, of recycling and reuse.

Books for slightly
older readers – preteens – can also provide a nicely creepy helping of fun at
Halloween, although The Wednesdays is
another of those seasonally appropriate books that are not directly about the
holiday.Julie Bourbeau’s (+++) debut
novel somewhat uneasily mixes humor with the weirdness of a story about the
strange things that happen in an otherwise normal village on Wednesdays, and only on Wednesdays.The residents have adapted well enough: they
shut their windows and doors and stay inside until the peculiarities have
passed for another week.But Maxwell
Valentino Bernard finds Wednesdays at home boring, and besides, when the book
begins, this particular Wednesday is his birthday, and he ends up misbehaving
just enough to let the wednesdays (the personifications of the day’s troubles
get a small “w”) into the house, where they wreak the same kind of petty but
nasty mischief indoors that they do to the unwary outdoors.It is that pettiness that quickly marks the
wednesdays as sprites of some sort rather than full-fledged demons: Max goes
swimming and, when he towels his hair, finds chewing gum in it; the blue pool
water turns out to have dye in it that turns his skin blue; his shoes are
missing when he goes to put them on; and so on.Tourists, unaware of what happens in town on this day of the week, have
bigger problems, such as cars that don’t start and whose bumpers fall off.For no particular reason, Max ends up
deciding to catch the wednesdays, and soon encounters a small and ugly dog
named Thursday “because he always goes after wednesdays,” his owner
explains.Not that the owner, himself a
strange chap, has ever seen a wednesday, and not that Thursday has ever caught
one; but still, Max realizes that if he is going to catch the whatever-they-are,
he could use some help.The thing about
the book is that the mystery evaporates very quickly: within 30 pages, Max has
met a wednesday face to face, or face to silver eyes, anyway; and the wednesday
has informed Max that Max’s name is really Next, and that propels the plot
thereafter, as the oddities that usually occur on Wednesdays start affecting
him on other days as well, and so he has
to figure out what is going on if he is to avoid, if he can avoid, becoming a wednesday himself.Bourbeau has a good sense of fun, and she
offers up some neat names (Mortimer Grimsrud, Dr. Conkle-Smoak), but when she
turns things serious, even deadly, at the book’s climax, there is a creakiness
to the plot and a sense that its parts fit together only because the author is
pushing them so hard.The Wednesdays does have enough chills
to make a suitable Halloween story, and the fact that Halloween falls on a
Wednesday in 2012 makes it a particularly apt book to read this year.But it is really not much more nutritious
than all the candy that kids traditionally over-consume on All Hallows’ Eve and
thereafter.